


Calming Draught, Taken Twice Daily

by OxfordOctopus



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Anxiety Disorder, F/F, Female Harry Potter, Femslash, Harry Potter Epilogue What Epilogue | EWE, Hogwarts Eighth Year, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Mental Health Issues, Not Epilogue Compliant, Potions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-26
Updated: 2019-07-26
Packaged: 2020-07-20 10:08:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,827
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19990375
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OxfordOctopus/pseuds/OxfordOctopus
Summary: (She pops the cork, tips it back, and does her best to not think about the taste of pickled peppermint and concentrated lavender oil.A calming draught, taken once at breakfast and once at dinner, is enough to help.)Poppy Lily Potter reflects - in the early din of the morning - on who and what has brought her to where she is now, spending her eighth year in a school that saved and ruined her in equal amounts.





	Calming Draught, Taken Twice Daily

The eighth year was not something Poppy wants to be there for. Hogwarts, to her, is a cold place full of the fingerprints of the dead, the reminder that she can't bring herself to be an Auror, that the world still expects excess of her even if she’s finally defeated her prophesied enemy.

Fat lot it did, she remembers herself thinking, watching the next headstone be put up like trees in a forest.

But, still, schedules are schedules and so she sits at her place in the grand hall and fusses over work she knows she should have and could have moved to in her third year, the year when divinity first bit her in the arse and the year when she found out Hagrid, bless the man, was unable to understand that no, not everyone has thick enough skin to endure his explorations into breeding monsters. She can't bring herself to fault the man, the man who now sits and hums over his own breakfast all the way up at the staff table, but something very bitter still bites at her shins as she tries desperately to cram enough Runes and Arithmancy work into her skull before she’s to take her NEWTs.

“Morning,” Ginny mumbles, stumbles over to slump down into her seat with a chuff. Poppy sends her a look, gets one back that says ‘Quidditch’ and has to force the smile down knowing just how much worse Ginny is than Oliver in terms of early morning practice.

Hermione plops down a few minutes later, looks no more awake than Ginny, but her ink-stained fingertips and messily-tied hair speak of studies instead of sports.

Ron won’t be down. Unlike Poppy, he could bring himself to become an Auror, to push forward in his goal without second-guessing, without flinching away from violence like she did back when Vernon’s girth and fists still felt like acts of war. Ron is gone off to be a defender, a protector, and Poppy knows better than to think she can do anything about it.

Poppy isn’t sure what she wants to do with her life, can’t bring herself to think too much about it, really. She is a lot of things to a lot of different people, ‘The-Girl-Who-Lived’ - or now ‘The-Girl-Who-Conquered’, unfortunately - to the public, ‘Pee-Pee Potty’ to Dudley, ‘Freak’ to Vernon and ‘Wastrel’ to Marge. She was ‘the image of her father’ in her first few years, only to come out of it as a careful blend of both parents, her mother’s eyes and red hairtone, her father’s skin color, his high cheekbones. She both is and isn’t all of the above, as her survival on that night hinged on her mother’s sacrificial magic and last time she checked she was damn sure she didn’t have a penis, so that was stricken off too. Maybe she’s a freak, like Vernon says, but not a wastrel, certainly not that.

A bite of bacon brings her back, the grease sticks to the roof of her mouth like taffy and she feels the sudden urge to empty her stomach.

“Poppy,” says the woman she’s named after, breaks her from the momentary trance. Poppy spins her gaze up to Madam Pomfrey, to the healer who looked so often after James and his gang that he found it important enough to make even his kid a reminder of good health and safety. “Your potion.”

Her potion.

Poppy lets her fingers tighten around the stem of the potion, draws it back into her hands and grimaces at it. Madam Pomfrey levels a brow, shows that she’s not about to let her complain, has never let her complain.

She pops the cork, tips it back, and does her best to not think about the taste of pickled peppermint and concentrated lavender oil. A calming draught, taken once at breakfast and once at dinner, is enough to help. Poppy had started taking them in her second year, when she first had her panic attack and Snape’s response to insult her and mock her about her fear of punishment had been met by a full-blown meltdown that left her unable to breathe or speak to comprehend her surroundings. A visit to Pomfrey later, a look at her back and her medical records - or the lack thereof, she supposed - led one thing to another and ended with her seeing a mind healer, who prescribed the derivative, low-potency 6-to-9 hour version of the calming draught to be taken twice daily.

It was a good choice, even with the repercussions. It had taken maybe three days before Skeeter had gotten hold of the fact that she had to take regimented, mentally-aiding potions every day and while Hermione and Ron had understood it didn’t stop every Tom, Dick or Harry with a passing grade in Defense from chiming in as a ‘well-researched individual’ to claim that her surviving a ‘dark curse like that’ had clearly addled her mind and made her unstable and unsafe to be around. No amount of actual mediwitches pointing out that what she took was a non-addictive supplement to ensure she wasn’t emotionally overwhelmed managed to stop the deluge, and Poppy had found herself with the dubious honor of being the reason why the mentally unwell community found itself maligned until the next news circuit, where her nearly being eaten by a dementor became more important than her taking a potion to blunt the broken edges that abuse had left her with.

It’s odd how the calming draught works. Poppy feels it settle into her, feels the way that it has no other purpose than to calm, and that is a fundamentally weird thing. Things have multiple uses, medicine can be poisons and poisons can be medicine with enough control over the doses and yet somehow her body knows that the calming draught will have no other purpose than to calm and exists solely to do so. She feels it take the edge off, blunting down anxiety and nausea and her inability to focus until her eyes resettle on her page while she hands the potion back, a mumbled “thanks, Poppy” getting her a good natured scowl from the mediwitch as she trots towards the next student in need of a potion, the number of which had gone rather up in the recent years for what should be obvious enough reasons.

Poppy grunts, lets the chill of the potion slide down from the base of her throat and fully soak into her, watches as Hermione wakes up slowly but surely and does her best not to think about the miserable year she spent with that locket and without her calming draught and how she must now rely on Slughorn instead of a man she had, grudgingly, come to respect even if he kept from her the fact that she needed to die. She keeps her mind away from the truth that she knows, back then, she would have accepted it, would have acknowledged that her life had to end and had never assumed that it would last beyond her eighteenth year, whether due to Vernon or the dangers she faced at Hogwarts.

“Poppy, you got this wrong,” Hermione brushes her ink-stained pinky over the page and Poppy also has to avoid thinking about her fingers for decidedly less than pure reasons, flicking her eyes to the Arithmancy page as the letters and numbers begin to make sense in a brain that is only now reordering itself. She has a decent grasp on occlumency, but it only works so far, only works when she has a decent grasp on her brain itself and, as the doctor had once said, her brain was simply wired wrong from abuse and simple genetics and she should be proud of how far she went without ever being medicated.

Flicking her quill, Poppy does the errors as Hermione orders because she can’t imagine herself ever not doing what the girl says, whether it is hunting basilisks or hunting horcruxes, and receives a smug, too-bright smile in return. Maybe it was infatuation at some time, though the year had tempered it down into a crude ingot of love that wasn’t quite so focused, that didn’t hinge on Hermione’s entire focus being on her all the time. She wonders if it’s unhealthy, that, if after all she went through, after all they went through, she would still like to be with Hermione, be with her when their relationship became somewhat in flux due to Ron during the hunt, even when Ron and Hermione hadn’t been together for half a year at that point. Ginny’s certainly not interested in her, had been dating Katie for a month now, apparently, and while Poppy tried dating Ginny when Hermione dated Ron, the spark just really wasn’t there.

Poppy lets her fingers gently brush over Hermione’s knuckles, watches in amusement as something close to a blush crawls up and over Hermione’s neck and onto her ears before framing her dusky cheekbones. It’s a surprise that Hermione’s fingers lace with her own, that the other girl doesn’t move her hand away and instead just drops her gaze bashfully. A lot of things are a surprise, she supposes, like being made the second Head Girl - because Head Boy was to go to Ron and he gave the school the finger before running off to join the Aurors - along with Hermione and how similar they are when Poppy isn’t facing down some sort of ambiguous, all-consuming evil that will make planning a successful study date either an act of god or an intentional act of defiance against an institution.

Ginny leans over, apparently looking to grab what was left of the breakfast spread before the elves took it all back, and stops only long enough to whisper something in Hermione’s ear with a fox’s smile. Poppy doesn’t pick up on much of it, but the words ‘shag’ and ‘head’ are found easily enough. Hermione releases their fingers, reels back, and smacks Ginny upside the head, who crows entirely too much like her twin siblings to be anything good and sends Poppy herself into a pitch of giggles, one that gets her cuffed behind her ears but with lingering fingers in her hair. She hides her face in her arms, unwilling to reveal fluttering eyes and cheeks so warm they must glow.

When finally the fingers retreat and finally Poppy drowsily pulls her head back up, Hermione is slotting up against her goodnaturedly, with an arm wrapped just a bit lower than it had been a day ago, enough that she knows the little things are still changing and that there are quiet promises in her grip, in how it tightens around her waist almost possessively. Perhaps for better or for worse, things will move on and even if she has to take a calming draught twice daily, she knows, beneath all of that, she can still enjoy the small things in her life.


End file.
